Foer's Call to Arms

Novelist Jonathan Safran Foer talks to Jane Ciabattari about his new nonfiction book, the horrors of factory farming, deciding what to feed his son, and why killing animals is just wrong.

My introduction to Jonathan Safran Foer’s work was in the pages of The New Yorker’s debut fiction issue, June 18, 2001. His astonishingly fresh voice was evident from the opening lines: “My legal name is Alexander Perchov. But all of my many friends dub me Alex, because that is a more flaccid-to-utter version of my legal name.” In Everything Is Illuminated, the novel from which the section was excerpted, Alex, butcher of English, serves as translator for Jonathan Safran Foer, auteur/hero, who is on a heritage tour of Ukraine in search the woman who hid his grandfather from the Nazis. The 2002 novel was honored with the Guardian First Book Prize, the National Jewish Book Award, and the New York Public Library Young Lions Prize. Foer’s second novel, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close (2004), revolved around a 9-year-old genius whose father was killed when the Twin Towers were attacked on Sept. 11, 2001.

“Every flu pandemic has had animal origins. And we are now raising tens of billions of animals in conditions that require sickness to be part of the business model. Our farms have become Petri dishes.”

Now the Brooklyn-based Foer is back with Eating Animals, a nonfiction book that is a well-reasoned and compassionate condemnation of factory farms, a call to arms for vegetarians, vegans, and those who choose to eat meat only if it is raised and butchered under humane conditions.

Eating Animals. By Jonathan Safran Foer. 352 pages. Little, Brown. $25.99. “Fatherhood compelled me to write Eating Animals,” Foer explained. “Like most people, I’d given some thought to what meat actually is, but until I became a father and faced the prospect of having to make food choices on someone else’s behalf, there was no urgency to get to the bottom of things.

“I never had it in mind to write nonfiction, and frankly I doubt I’ll ever do it again. But this topic, at this moment, is something no one should ignore. (As a writer, putting words on the page is how I pay attention.) If animal agriculture isn’t the most important problem in the world right now—it’s the No. 1 cause of global warming, No. 1 cause of animal suffering, a decisive factor in the creation of zoonotic diseases like bird and swine flu, and so on—it is the problem with the most deafening silence surrounding it. Even the most political people, the most thoughtful and engaged, tend not to ‘go there.’ And for good reason. Going there can be extremely uncomfortable. Food is not just what we put in our mouths to fill up; it is culture and identity. Reason plays some role in our decisions about food, but it’s rarely driving the car.”

Foer spent three years researching animal agriculture for the book. He builds his argument against factory farms through statistics, oral history, and research across a spectrum of meat producers, from commendable farms like Niman Ranch in Marin County to foul turkey barns where creatures live in misery and die horribly. He writes that 99 percent of all animals eaten come from factory farms. “This has to do with the incredible amount of chicken Americans now eat—about 150 times as much as we did 80 years ago,” he says. He breaks the figure down like this: 99.94 percent of chickens raised for meat in America are factory farmed; 95.41 percent of pigs; 78.2 percent of cows. The definition of “factory farming” becomes somewhat looser with respect to cows, he adds. “And this doesn’t get into fish, not because they have it any better, or because we should care any less. But fish aren’t ever tabulated as individuals, only as mass.”